Aboriginal Islam

This week we explore the early history of Muslim immigration to Australia, focusing on the connections between Muslim immigrants and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. A story of surprising encounters and unexpected histories.

Transcript

ABORIGINAL ISLAM

Transcript for Encounter

Kerry Stewart: Hello, I’m Kerry Stewart. Welcome to the program.

When you think of Muslim immigration to Australia, when would you say it started? Most of us, I suspect, would take as a starting point the wave of Lebanese immigrants who arrived in the mid-70s, but in fact, Muslims have traded with Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples for centuries. And over 150 years ago, others came in their thousands to help open up our desert heartlands.

This week, we trace their journey from Indonesian islands to outback Central Australia and many places in between. It’s a story of rich histories and surprising encounters. The program is produced by Janak Rogers.

Janak Rogers: I’m standing on the water’s edge here on the little island of Barang Lompo in Indonesia. It's just off the coast of the city of Makassar on the southern tip of Sulawesi. Looking around me I can see all the fishing boats are in the harbour; behind me a few fishermen are chatting away and in the distance you can no doubt hear the muezzin’s call to prayer from the local mosque. Somewhere about 1000 kilometres south of here is the coast of Australia.

My name is Janak Rogers and in this program for Encounter on RN, I’m delving into the story of the contact between Islam and Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples. It’s a story that takes us from here on the Indonesian coast to the desert heart of Central Australia and to the big smoke of central Sydney. But it all begins here, thanks to a rather unassuming little sea creature, known in Bahasa as trepang or in English as ‘sea cucumber’.

And I’m just going to go and talk to some of the fishermen here who make their living from the trepang trade.

I meet Hadji Tari, a fisherman and trepang trader who’s sitting with a group of friends under the shade of a tarpaulin. As we talk, some of them unload and weigh a freshly caught batch of fat, white sea cucumbers, just arrived on the boat. My translator is Akhsan Khan.

Hadji Tari (via translator): Most of the trepangs that Hadji Tari buys, most of the trepangs he sells at Poetere Port. But sometimes people from China, Korea they come here…

Janak Rogers: The come all the way from China to here because this is the main place to buy it?

Hadji Tari (via translator): Yeah, yeah. Or in Poetere Island.

Janak Rogers: It’s this trade in trepang, which the Chinese particularly value as a medicine and as a food, that first drew the Muslim Makassan fishermen as far south as Australia. Anthropologist Dr John Bradley, from Melbourne’s Monash University, explains:

John Bradley: The Makassans, they came from the west. So they’re arriving on the monsoon winds to gather trepang, they’re staying for the duration of that period and then the easterlies will come and they’ll go back on those winds. And during that period they’re gathering trepang, boiling trepang, drying trepang, loading them in the boats. And of course you can’t work 24 hours a day, so there’s a whole lot of other social intercourse going on as well.

Janak Rogers: Makassans and Australia’s Indigenous people traded for hundreds of years. Aboriginal rock paintings of Makassan ships have been dated at 400 years old. This predates the arrival of the British by some two centuries. It was the first time we know that Muslims arrived in Australia. They left a lasting legacy in art, religion, in Makassan words that are still used in Aboriginal languages today, and in song—like this one from the Yanyuwa people of Carpentaria that celebrates the trepang harvest.

(Music—Yanyuwa song)

Janak Rogers: Dr John Bradley works particularly with the Yanyuwa people in Carpentaria and he stresses that each tribe interacted differently with the Makassans, particularly when it came to religion.

John Bradley: Where I work in the Gulf Country you won’t find any remnant of any Islamic presence—it’s just not there. And yet if you go to Northeast Arnhem Land it is there; it is there in song, it is there in painting, it is there in dance, it is there in funeral rituals. It is patently obvious that here are borrowed items and with linguistic analysis as well you are hearing hymns to Allah, or at least certain prayers to Allah. So for the Northeast Arnhem Landers at least, it’s an intense interaction, you know, they’ve taken on board at a very deep level.

(Music)

Howard Morphy: My name is Howard Morphy. I’m a professor of anthropology at the Australian National University and I’ve been working with Yolgnu people, people from Northeast Arnhem Land, since 1973.

Janak Rogers: Dr Howard Morphy is the leading anthropological expert on the Yolgnu people, the group who were arguably most open to the religious encounter with the Muslim Makassans. The Yolgnu still worship a figure called Walitha'walitha. The name derives from an appellation for Allah which was drawn into Aboriginal cosmology. But even he says we should be careful not to describe this as a conversion of Islam rather than a form of cosmological adoption.

Howard Morphy: I think it would be hugely oversimplifying to suggest that this figure in itself is Allah as sort of ‘one true God’. But it’s projecting—if it is referring to Allah—Allah back beyond into the Dreaming. It’s Allah as a true god of the people who are coming in from outside incorporated within Yolgnu cosmology.

Janak Rogers: The Makassan trepang trade with Aboriginals ended in the early 1900s, killed off by heavy government taxation. This shared history between Aboriginals and the Muslim Makassans is hardly known in wider Australia, but it is still celebrated by some Aboriginal communities in the far north. Dr John Bradley:

John Bradley: The critical point is, for me, is that they represent Australia’s first big attempt and successful attempt at international relations. You know, they traded. They traded goods, they worked together—so these are things that people still remember and remember with great fondness. Across all of northern Australia, this is a golden age, one of these golden ages of where people saw each other as human and worked together as humans. Whereas once the Makassans stopped, and even before the Makassans stopped of course, you get this colonial frontier mentality where Indigenous people are dehumanised, removed from country, moved from land and there is no relationship.

Janak Rogers: And while the trade between Muslim Makassans and Indigenous Australians may have ended in 1906, the harvesting of sea cucumber continued, this time under colonial authority.

John Bradley: Well, I think the trade stopped because we decided that we wanted a White Australia policy, that there was the ‘Yellow Peril’, the Makassans were Asian. And it stopped very soon after Australia became a parliament and introduced its White Australia policy. It stopped very, very quickly.

But I think one of the other untold stories embedded in this is it wasn’t the end of the trepang trade. Because where I work, you then get a number of white people coming in when the Makassans are gone and they know the Makassans are not coming back, because they’ve been traded out by immense tariffs on their goods, you get a number of white people coming in who then go to the Indigenous population and say, ‘Do you people remember how to harvest trepang?’ ‘Yes, we remember.’ ‘Will you work for us?’ ‘Yes, we’ll work for you.’ But it was a different relationship. There was no… they were the white bosses and they were gathering trepang and sending them to the markets in Asia. And Indigenous people provided in the first instance the knowhow and the labour force. And I think this is again another untold part of this story, and it’s a much more colonial story.

(Audio from archival film: ‘Swept by the winds of the Arafura, the Timor and the Coral Seas, the tiny pearling ports of Australia’s far north are scattered along 3000 miles of lonely tropical coastline…’)

Janak Rogers: This audio comes from a short film produced in 1949 by the Australian National Film Board. It’s called The Pearlers. Shot in black and white, it shows scenes from the pearling trade in Western Australia. We see scenes of the pearlers heading out to sea on boats called ‘luggers’. They’re wearing those old-school pressurised diving suits—the ones with the big helmets. The pearlers drop overboard into the ocean, emerging with great hauls of pearl shells. The film is a sort of ‘day in the life’ of your average Aussie pearler. But the pearlers weren’t strictly Aussies.

(Audio fromThe Pearlers: ‘In early March the lugger fleets, manned by their crews of Malays, Koepangers, Aborigines, Chinese and an occasional European, speed out to start the year’s fishing…’)

Hanifa Deen: The pearling industry in northern Australia created a world of ethnic and cultural diversity in centres like Darwin and also in Broome.

Janak Rogers: The sea cucumber trade between Indigenous Australians and Indonesian Makassans may have ended in 1906, but as Hanifa Deen, an author of many books on Australia’s early Muslim immigration, explains, elsewhere on the north coast, Asians, Aboriginals and Europeans were living and working together.

Hanifa Deen: You had the master pearlers who strutted around in their white suits, their canes and their pith helmets. And they kept everyone in order. But underneath this stratum of elite society you had Chinese, you had Malays, you had Filipinos, you had Indigenous divers—all involved doing the dangerous and the messy work involved with diving, the sailing of the boats, the scrubbing of the decks, the cooking of the food.

(Audio fromThe Pearlers: ‘When the mother of pearl shell comes on board, it is covered with sponge and sea grass and tiny coral formations. So it is captured from the sea: pearl shell for the buttons on evening shirts, the knife handles on dinner tables, for the dials of compasses, watches and delicate instruments, for jewellery and ornaments…’)

Janak Rogers: Diving for pearl shell was notoriously dangerous work. The boats would stay out for weeks at a time and there were all sorts of other perils that faced the pearl divers.

(Audio fromThe Pearlers: ‘When the face glass goes in, the diver is on his own. Cut off from the things around him, he is about to enter a grotesque and inhuman world. On the alert for attacks from whales and gropers, for coral formations that can cut his line to pieces, the diver comes up slowly, in stages, to avoid the risk of the dreaded divers’ paralysis…’)

Janak Rogers: It was largely because of these dangers Asian immigrants were brought in as cheap and so-called expendable labour. Many were in fact indentured labourers who were stuck working just to pay off the price of coming to Australia. By 1875, almost 2000 Malay pearl divers, many of whom were Muslim, were living in Western Australia. Sociologist Peta Stephenson:

Peta Stephenson: It was very hard and dangerous work and the white pearling masters didn’t want to engage in that work themselves, so they brought over cheap Asian indentured labour. And as with the history with the Makassans, the Asian men gravitated towards Aboriginal people. Both Asian and Aboriginal people were usually shunned by the wider communities in Broome and Darwin and in Thursday Island in the Torres Strait.

Janak Rogers: At its peak in the early 1900s, Australia’s pearling industry, centred in Broome and the Torres Strait, provided over half the world’s pearl shells. Thousands of people from across Asia worked here. But the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, which of course formed the basis of the White Australia policy, caused something of a snag for the pearling industry.

Bringing labourers from Asia was initially banned, but Broome was in fact eventually exempted from the White Australia policy. It was one of the few places Asians could come to in Australia at the time and it left lasting connections, particularly between Broome’s Aborigines, Asians and their descendants.

Peta Stephenson: Today, if you go to Broome the majority of Aboriginal people there have some Asian ancestry.

Janak Rogers: Sociologist Peta Stephenson interviewed many Aboriginal-Malay descendants for her book called Islam Dreaming, which looks at the long histories between Muslims and Australia’s Indigenous people.

Peta Stephenson: A lot of those men who came, particularly those from Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore, were Muslim and they were encountering Aboriginal women who were usually by that time mission-raised—so they were Catholic, for instance, in Broome. And I became very interested in how the children of those unions self-identified: did they take on either of their parents’ religious outlooks, or did they marry the two into an interesting combination? And I often found that that was the case. The children selected parts of Islam, parts of their Aboriginal heritage, parts of Catholicism, and married them in a rather sort of syncretic way of living as an Aboriginal who could be Muslim sometimes and could be Catholic at other times.

Janak Rogers: By the 1930s, the Malay community in Broome had built their own mosque and a Muslim community had taken root. But the pearl-shelling industry, however, was fading and by the start of the Second World War it was effectively over, pearl shells surpassed by the new wonder material.

(Audio from 1940s plastics ad: ‘Plastic, plastic, plastic. What are plastics? Are they a gift of nature, or an invention of man’s…?)

Janak Rogers: While plastics may have brought about the end of the pearl-shelling trade by the end of the mid-20th century, and taxation and the White Australia policy ended the Makassan trade some 50 years before that, elsewhere in Australia another Muslim community was thriving—but this time far from the coast, in the desert heartland.

(Music)

You’re listening to Encounter on RN. I’m Janak Rogers, exploring the early Muslim immigration to Australia and the lasting connections between Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples and Islam.

I’ve come to Alice Springs in search of the next chapter in the story of Aboriginal Islam and, as with the Makassans who came to Australia’s far north looking for sea cucumbers, here again in Central Australia it’s a particular animal that spurred contact between Muslims from afar and Aborigines. But in this case it’s not an animal that the Muslim visitors came looking for in Australia but rather one they brought with them.

(Sound of a camel grunting)

That was the rather charming sound of a camel, one of up to a million camels that now roam wild in the deserts of Central Australia. Introduced in the late 1800s, with the camels came the Afghans and with the Afghans came Islam.

Ray Satour: Good morning. My name’s Ray Satour and I’m a descendent of the Afghan clan. My grandfather’s father, he was a camel driver. He lived at Marree in South Australia.

Janak Rogers: Sixty-two-year-old Raymond Satour is one of many Aboriginal descendants of the Afghan cameleers. We meet at his house on the outskirts of Alice Springs, surrounded by the deep red desert dust and the sound of buzzing cicadas.

Ray Satour: Two grandfathers we had. My great-grandfather’s father was Sayed Satour and my grandmother’s father was Sayed Mulladad. They come from Pishin to Australia in the early days.

Janak Rogers: Pishin, by the way, is a town in modern-day Pakistan on the Afghan border. The cameleers are often referred to collectively as ‘Afghans’, but in fact they came from across Afghanistan, India and what later became Pakistan.

Ray Satour: They had their own camels and they used to follow the old Ghan line up to Central Australia. On the camel train itself, that’s where they met the Aboriginal people—they was camping out in the bush. Like, that’s how come we connected to the Aboriginals.

Janak Rogers: Between 1860 and 1930, around 4000 cameleers came to Australia, bringing their camels with them. They played a key role in opening up the deserts, providing supplies to remote mission stations and laying crucial national infrastructure like the overland telegraph line and the Ghan railway line.

Raymond Satour, for one, is rightfully proud of his Afghan ancestors’ contribution to Australian life. He brings out a book called Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Cameldrivers in Australia, by Christine Stevens.

Ray Satour: It’s all the history—like, where they started off and where they come from. It just goes right through.

Janak Rogers: We turn to a page with photos of his family. The largest is a photo of his great-grandfather, Sayed Mulladad, who looks around 60 when the photo was taken. He cuts a rather dashing figure, sporting a long moustache that’s curved like a scimitar, and a coiled turban towers on his head.

Ray Satour: …Mulladad… Here he is—Sayed Mulladad.

Janak Rogers: Ah, there you go, this is your…

Ray Satour: That’s my grandmother’s father.

Janak Rogers: So he’s the head honcho…?

Ray Satour: He’s the head honcho, yeah (laughs).

Janak Rogers: I have to say, Raymond is beaming at this point. The last few years, Raymond and his wife Frida have been researching his family history, digging into the archives to learn more about his Afghan roots. And he’s clearly passionate about it.

Ray Satour: 1902.

Janak Rogers: 1902 is when he arrived?

Ray Satour: Yes.

Janak Rogers: OK. First worked in Mildura, Victoria.

Ray Satour: Married May Humphries. She was an Englishwoman, born at… what’s this one here?

Janak Rogers: In Madras, which is modern-day Chennai.

Ray Satour: Yeah, right.

Janak Rogers: So it says, ‘Married May Humphries, born in Madras (modern-day Chennai) of English father and Indian mother in Broken Hill, South Australia.’

Ray Satour: Oh, right. And then went to Oodnadatta, 1910, to work with his camels under the line that came to Alice Springs—like, the railway line.

Janak Rogers: Wow, it says here he gave an interview in 1924 saying, ‘He expressed great optimism about the camel business, believing that the extension of the railway line would generate extra business. He moved with the line, carrying on till about 1935.’

Ray Satour: Yeah. Well, he had a son and that’s the son went back.

Janak Rogers: Raymond Satour may be a few generations removed from the great Afghan patriarch Sayed Mulladad, but the connection with Islam lives on. It’s part of his identity and that of his family. Frida, Ray’s wife of 42 years, is Aboriginal and she says their children can choose how they want to identify.

Frida Satour: Well, they went through Aboriginal lore, but they were also baptised Church of England when they were small, his age. And then when they got older and the mosque started up and we had this lovely old fella from Adelaide come up and he wanted to baptise all the kids. And I sort of asked my sons, because they were of an age where they can make their own decision, and they done it.

Janak Rogers: Frida Satour is Western Arrernte. Alice Springs and its surrounds are her traditional lands. She says the mixed identities can be a source of strength for her children, but it’s also a challenge to be caught between worlds and to have to move between them.

Frida Satour: I reckon sometimes it gets hard, because you’ve got the European way and that’s sort of got… you’ve got all the laws and everything to follow, eh? Then you’ve got the Muslim way. Then you’ve got the Aboriginal way. So it’s three cultures and it enriches them but… I reckon it makes them stronger, but yeah, sometimes they must come to a crossroad where they’ve got to decide within themselves what’s right and what’s wrong.

(Music)

Azeem Khan: My name is Azeem Johnny Khan. John is my middle name—got a little white man’s name in there. And my dad was Arrernte and his mother was Arrernte and his father was one of the cameleers.

Yeah, I consider myself an Afghan cameleer descendant and no one could tell me any different. And, you know, I said I’m proud of my grandfather and his mates that came over with him. Done a lot of work and built the old railway line. My first job was on the railway line what my pop worked on.

Janak Rogers: Fifty-two-year-old Azeem Khan is also mixed Afghan and Aboriginal and works as a landscaper with his brother Tom in Alice Springs.

We meet during his lunch break in their large warehouse and garage, surrounded by half-built cars and oversized lawn mowers. Azeem is not a practising Muslim but he’s deeply proud of his Islamic roots. He’s also one of the few Afghan Aboriginals who has kept ties with his family overseas.

Azeem Khan: Dad used to read the Koran all the time and he knew lots of the stories. And he used to write to his sister back over in Pakistan. When we did get in touch with them we ended up getting a CD from the family over there. They showed videos of those letters that Dad sent in the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s. So they’ve still got them all treasured and all sealed up and that. So it was funny to see my Dad’s signature on those letters and Mum’s writing—because Mum used to do the writing, Dad used to do the signature down the bottom. And it’s really good see, you know? Photos of us kids and that.

(Music)

Janak Rogers: Azeem’s brother Tom grew up in Marree in South Australia, historically one of the main Afghan towns. It’s about 700 kilometres north of Adelaide, on the edge of the desert of Central Australia. Today, only about 60 people live in Marree, but for Tom growing up, far from being cut off from the world, Marree was multicultural and cosmopolitan.

Tom Khan: It was really good, mate. It was… I think the harmony of the old people and the white people and the Aboriginal people… I mean, you had Italians, you had all sorts of nationalities there, but they all lived in harmony in Marree. Everyone all got on really well together. Because everybody who was there, everybody worked hard to make Marree and make the whole country what it is today. A hell of a lot less [prejudice] in a place like that. A multicultural environment is a lot better. There was that many different cultures in Marree, it wasn’t even funny!

Janak Rogers: Within Azeem and Tom’s family there was not only a generational divide, but a cultural and religious one, spanning Afghan, Western Arrernte and Christianity. Azeem and Tom tell this somewhat cheeky story of riding around with their Muslim father, who was much more observant of Islamic taboos than them.

Azeem Khan: Mum didn’t eat pork till, I don’t know… I don’t know when she… a long time after Dad passed away.

Tom Khan: Yeah, you ate pork in front of the old fella you got a big flogging—oh hell yeah. The old man, I can remember the old fella when he was alive, we were driving round in Adelaide. And we had a mad cousin of ours and he was driving of course and the old fella’s sitting on the passenger side. And he would… our cousin would deliberately drive past a pig sty. Well, and the old man would be, ‘Oh, you..!’ He’d be swearing and carrying on and cussing and spitting and ‘Oh, get me out of here you dirty so-and-so, bastard!’ you know. And the old man didn’t like it.

But our cousin was a bit of a jokester and he was a real funny fella. And he seen… but the old bloke seen the funny side of it a long time later. I mean, he thought, you know, when they really did decide to talk about it, the old man would sit back and he’d say, ‘Yeah, that bloody [cousin’s name], eh? That time he took us to them stinking pigs!’ But yeah.

Azeem Khan: Or that other place he took him to—the strip joints and all! And Dad’s sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, someone’s going to come and sing,’ but he got a big shock when the woman come out taking her clothes off (laughs).

Janak Rogers: That would shock anyone, not just an old Afghan I think!

Azeem Khan: Oh, he spun around for them two boys. They were sitting at the bar, they were laughing their heads off.

(Music)

We love our culture, love our old grandfather’s way of life. And yeah, there’s not too many of us are religious. I suppose we grew up with God and Jesus stuff. Dad even believed in that stuff. I suppose it’s a peace of mind thing. Pop taught his two sons and two daughters the Koran stuff on the camel train; Nanna taught them Western Arrente and English. So they had the three worlds there on the camel train. So they grew up very smart people.

(Music)

Janak Rogers: It’s early evening here in Alice Springs and I’m in a part of town called Larapinta. It’s a sort of suburb about four kilometres from the town centre. I’ve come here to find a rather extraordinary building that’s tucked into this residential area. And here it is. The sign reads ‘Afghan Mosque’, and there’s some text in Arabic and of course a picture of a camel.

Walking in, it’s a fairly large brick building. There’s a minaret and a couple of Islamic crescents. All of it is set against the MacDonnell Ranges here, which are just behind it—a beautiful mix of craggy rock and again the iconic red dirt of Central Australia.

It does seem remarkable that there is an Afghan mosque here in the middle of Alice Springs. But in fact there used to be mosques dotted throughout the deserts of Central Australia. They were known as ‘tin mosques’, because they were built just from sheets of metal, of course built by the cameleers.

Hanifa Deen: The men were Muslims. They were Muslims who were used to following the basic rituals of Islam. They might not be able to pray five times a day, because they were leading a hundred camels along the roads, but they did their best to pray three times a day and always at sunset and always at dawn as well.

Janak Rogers: Author Hanifa Deen’s ancestors are from present-day Pakistan and came to Australia at the end of the 19th century. They weren’t actually cameleers but in fact hawkers and traders. Born in 1941, she grew up in Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and even remembers some of the ageing cameleers living there when she was a child.

Hanifa Deen: As a little girl, particularly on Eid days at the end of fasting, I would visit the mosque and I’d be gazing at these very, very old men. They seemed to me the oldest men in the world. I’d see these old men wearing their turbans and they were shuffling around in sandals and old leather slippers, pulling gently on their hookahs. Their faces were chiselled and lined and they spoke to Dad in a language that I couldn’t understand. I think now they must have been single men or widowers whose wives in India or Pakistan had died long ago and they had no families anymore and they had not married in Australia, this group of men. And I now realise that I was witness to a dying breed of men.

Janak Rogers: Hanifa Deen has gone on to write a number of books about early Muslim immigration to Australia and says the cameleers, however far from home, did their best to keep their religious heritage alive while in Australia.

Hanifa Deen: They would fast, even though this again was very, very difficult for them. Sometimes they’d try to congregate together during the month of Ramadan; sometimes they would say, ‘No, we’re not carting anything during this period.’ And they would gather and they would pray regularly and have prayer readings. They tried their best to build a few simple mosques—mud-walled, tin-roofed. And often I think they were probably very simple mosques, like they were originally in Mecca and Medina in the time of the Prophet, not like the splendid mosque palaces that we have today.

Janak Rogers: It was in fact Raymond Satour’s father, Ali John Satour, who helped build the local Alice Springs mosque. Raymond himself doesn’t go there often to pray, but in a way the mosque comes to him. The local imam, a Fijian Indian, and some of the local worshippers, immigrants from India, Pakistan and elsewhere, do weekly visits to hold prayers and teachings at the homes of the Afghan-Aboriginal descendants. But the mosque of course remains at the heart of the Islamic community in Alice Springs.

Ray Satour: Well, we had nothing here for the Muslims, where they can go and pray and everything like that—and burial service. So when we had to bury any Muslims in Central Australia we had to bring the mullah from Adelaide to do it. And that was ongoing—all the old Muslims were passing away and things like that, so the old man, my father, sort of helped with the mosque then. We had enough Muslims in Alice Springs to look at a mosque, you know?

(Music)

Janak Rogers: It’s my last day in Alice Springs, and I’ve come to what I thought would be perhaps one of the only places to connect with the story of Aboriginal Islam here: the old cemetery. It’s a large open ground, filled with tombstones, most of which are adorned with crucifixes. But here in the far corner, under a sign saying ‘Mohammedan’, there are about 30 to 40 graves, all facing east, toward the holy city of Mecca.

I can see the grave of Raymond’s father, lined with pebble stones and colourful faux flowers. And there others, not just of the Satour family, but the Khans, the Mudjeeds, Saidals, Mahomets and others. From a distance, it did seem like a historical curiosity, this extraordinary moment of contact between the Afghan cameleers, Aboriginals, and of course the wider society of colonists back in the 1800s and the turn of the 20th century.

But these graves clearly aren’t all that’s left of this history. It lives on in the descendants of the cameleers, in people like the Satours and in places like the Afghan mosque, where today a new immigrant community from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Turkey, come to say their daily prayers. It’s a mosque that owes its existence not just to the Afghan cameleers but also to their Aboriginal descendants.

(Mosque prayers)

You’re listening to Encounter on RN. I’m Janak Rogers, delving into the history and lives of Australia’s Aboriginal Muslim community.

I’m here in Sydney in the main hall of bustling Central Station. I can see everyone rushing to get their trains, all glued to their mobile phones and clutching cups of takeaway coffee. It’s the morning rush hour.

Sydney, of course, is a city of immigrants—from the British who arrived here in 1788 to the large communities of Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and everyone else who’s arrived since. But of course for tens of thousands of years this has been Aboriginal land, specifically the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.

Today it’s a place where many of the more recent Aboriginal converts to Islam live and I’ve come here to meet a few of them and to hear about their journey to Islam.

(Sound from boxing gym)

It’s in a sweaty boxing gym in Redfern in Sydney’s inner city that I meet one of the most prominent Aboriginal Muslims, a man who almost needs no introduction, but here’s one anyway:

Anthony Mundine: Hello, my name is Anthony Stephen John Mundine. Born 21 May 1975. I am the best athlete to come out of this country, but even worldwide I believe that no one’s walked my walk.

Janak Rogers: Anthony Mundine is a three-time world champion boxer and a former rugby league player. He’s a member of the Bundjalung Aboriginal people, but he’s proudly and outspokenly Muslim.

(Archival sound. Announcer: ‘You’re now a dual division world champion in what was a very tough evening.’ Anthony Mundine: ‘All praise be to Allah! God is the greatest. That’s first and foremost, but I want to thank all the fans here tonight…’)

Anthony Mundine: You have faith. You have faith in the Almighty, the All-powerful. They can plan, but only God is the greatest of planners. And if God has destined me to be what I want to be or do what I want, nothing can stop Allah’s plan.

Janak Rogers: Anthony Mundine’s journey to Islam started when he read the autobiography of Malcolm X, the African American civil rights activist and Muslim leader. In it, he found parallels between Islam and his Aboriginal beliefs.

Anthony Mundine: When I read the Malcolm X book I had to read it twice. I didn’t really get it the first time. You know, we were brought up in the Christian faith but there were too many unanswered questions that couldn’t be answered. And I’d done a bit of research on Aboriginal beliefs and they talked about the Dreamtime and this and that, but if you delved deeper the Aboriginal people believed in one God, one Creator and the Mother is the Earth.

(Music)

I want to inspire all Aboriginals not to be naïve, not to have the blinkers on and tunnel vision. Learn about your culture, learn deep about your culture, learn what your culture… how we do believe in certain things that’s exactly the same as Islam. Because Muhammad… Jesus was sent to the Jews, but Muhammad was sent to all mankind. So it doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Aboriginal, Chinese, Indian, he was sent to all men. That’s the answer: the Koran.

(Music)

Janak Rogers: I’m here in Hyde Park in the very heart of Sydney. It’s something of an island of green, surrounded by skyscrapers and looming office blocks. I’m here to meet Justin Agale, who is an Aboriginal man and practising Muslim.

Justin Agale: I’m a Ngaanyatjarra man from the Pilbara region of Western Australia and a Meriam man on my father's side from the Torres Strait Islands in north Queensland.

My journey to Islam wasn’t a conscious decision in seeking religion, but rather seeking a way forward for myself personally in dealing with issues relating to colonialism and growing up in Far North Queensland of extreme racism, of being told that you’re nothing every day, being constantly put into a position where you feel like you’re nothing and you start to believe that you’re nothing.

I came to a conclusion very early on that a lot of problems facing Indigenous people in Australia are actually spiritual problems and are problems… what we would call a ‘disease of the heart’.

Janak Rogers: For Justin Agale it was in large part this struggle against what he sees as Australia’s colonial legacy that drove his spiritual journey. But in many ways his spiritual journey began as a political one.

Justin Agale: I went through the normal stages of looking at black nationalism, looking at the Black Panthers, also looking at socialism, communism and any sort of left-wing radical ideology that I thought could bring about, I suppose, an internal sense of peace but also justice for myself, internally and externally.

When I started looking at the Native American movements from the 1960s and 1970s, especially the American Indian movement, I came to a realisation that what strengthened those movements was a strong attachment to their traditional beliefs—and really grounded in thousands of years of history and tradition and culture and belief. And that was something that was missing from a lot of the other ideologies that I looked at.

So I started looking at my own beliefs and my own culture and looking for truth. And I really got drawn into what’s called the Bomai Malo from Mer in the Torres Strait.

(Music)

When I eventually became Muslim, the decision was based upon, one, Islam was in line with my traditional beliefs and I saw it as a continuation of my traditional beliefs and a fulfilment of certain prophecies in the Torres Strait; secondly, as a way that I could know God directly. Because one thing that Islam has—and especially when you start getting into the Sufi tradition, which I belong to—is the names and attributes of God are very clearly laid out: God is merciful, He is forgiving, He is compassionate, He is all these things. And it’s very clear who you’re dealing with and you can start looking in your daily life to see His hand at work.

Janak Rogers: As with Anthony Mundine, for Justin Agale Malcolm X’s story also played a crucial role in directing him to Islam.

Justin Agale: Malcolm’s journey was unbelievable. This was a man who, yes, he was interested in social justice and in furthering the cause of his people, but he was interested in his own spiritual journey to truth. What made him remarkable was that he was willing to adjust his position according to what he’d learnt.

So when he did his Hajj, his trip to Mecca, we see a shift in his spiritual development away from being a black man, away from being an African American, towards being a human being. And he makes this very clear when he says that Islam had removed the whiteness from the hearts of the European Muslims that he had met. The converse side of that is that it removed the blackness from his heart. And I really think… it dawned on me that blackness is a social condition and whiteness is a social condition. A description I once heard is that whiteness is the arrogance of Europe. So when you remove that blackness you can start being a human being and you start having a direct relationship with God.

(Music)

Malcolm X (archival): I recall I pointed out that while I was at Mecca making the pilgrimage I spoke about the brotherhood that existed at all levels and among all people who were there on that Hajj, who had accepted the religion of Islam.

Janak Rogers: This is Malcolm X speaking in 1964 after his Hajj, his pilgrimage to Mecca. By this time he’d split from the more radical Nation of Islam, which he’d come to see as divisive and racist, and was advocating more of a middle way.

Malcolm X (archival): What the religion of Islam had done for those people over there, despite their complexion differences, that it would probably do America well to study the religion of Islam and perhaps it could drive some of the racism from this society as it has driven racism from the Muslim society.

Janak Rogers: Malcolm X converted to Islam during a stint in prison when he was 20. He went on to become a notoriously firebrand civil rights activist. He left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and was assassinated a year later by the Nation of Islam as punishment for leaving it.

On some level, his story seems worlds away from contemporary Australia. But as sociologist Peta Stephenson has found, Malcolm X’s story has resonated with many Aboriginal converts to Islam, especially those, like Malcolm X, who’ve been caught up in the criminal justice system.

Peta Stephenson: Having time to read while in prison and ponder where their life was going and what life was all about, and the circumstances that had led to their incarceration, young men started to often actually read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And sometimes the men were disaffected, they were angry, and they gravitated towards the story of Malcolm X because they saw him as some sort of, I guess, anti-white pioneer or champion whom they wanted to emulate. But almost always the men then eventually relied only on the Koran.

Janak Rogers: I asked New South Wales Correctional Services if I could interview any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person who’d found Islam in prison, but they turned me down. But I did track down someone else who spends a lot of time behind bars and who knows many of the Aboriginal Muslim converts.

Farhan Khalil: My name is Farhan Khalil. I work for corrective services as a Muslim imam. There is a vast population of Aboriginals within the prison system. We could say about 20 per cent, roughly. You know how everyone’s curious about Islam nowadays, so I guess Aboriginals are also curious about it, so they do ask questions. And a lot of people, you know, they just don’t rush into Islam; they take their time, they go through a lot of literature and whenever you’re out there they approach you, they want to know about it, they’re curious about spirituality.

Janak Rogers: Farhan Khalil finds that Islamic discipline has had a positive impact on many Aboriginal inmates he works with, helping them deal with the challenges they face.

Farhan Khalil: What Islam has done for them, they’ve given them a discipline, they’ve given them a structure. It talks about how you should have your family values and at the same time it does talk about, you know, you’ve got to have structure, you’ve got to stay away from all these problems that are coming. It’s the main source is gambling, alcohol and drugs. And they tend to calm down and become more peace loving. And because all their anger is around what is happening to them, they try to really understand what faith is about. And everything that happens is… there is a force, there’s God, Allah, it’s happening for a reason.

(Music)

Mohammad: Are you rolling now?

Janak Rogers: Yes, rolling now. Would you like to give your name or not?

Mohammad: No, I’ll go by an alias, whatever alias you choose for me.

Janak Rogers: OK. Maybe you should choose your own alias?

Mohammad: No, you can think of it. There’s millions of Islamic names out there.

Janak Rogers: We settled on ‘Mohammad’ eventually. So, Mohammad—not his real name—lives and works in Sydney. He converted to Islam six years ago after spending five years fighting alcoholism and living on the streets. We meet in a park where he tells me he once used to sleep.

Mohammad: When I look back over my life and see what steps led to me finally converting six years ago, I truly believe now that that was the fastest path that Allah had chosen for me.

Janak Rogers: Today, Mohammad has absolutely turned his life around. As a Muslim he of course no longer drinks alcohol, takes drugs or gambles. And for years now he’s held down a steady, professional job. He feels Islam has given him answers that his Aboriginal cultural beliefs couldn’t, particularly since so much of traditional Aboriginal life was destroyed in the colonial process.

Mohammad: Where is my culture? That was cut off from me two generations ago. Here in New South Wales where my Aboriginal descendancy comes from, I don’t have any traditional practice of that. My grandmother was where it stopped, where we stopped practising and stopped speaking language.

One of the attractive sort of things about Islam to me was that I found something that was unbroken, which not only gave me access to the source, the Prophet Muhammad, but access to that tradition and the practice that allowed me to be able to not only spiritually get in touch with a tradition, but also physically removed me from my sleep, my mental sleep, and my physical addictions to drugs and alcohol, OK? And bad behaviour.

Janak Rogers: Mohammad, like Justin Agale, has found Islam has provided a form of refuge from the racism and dispossession he’s felt as an Aboriginal person living in Australia.

Mohammad: When I found Islam, it was the first time in my life that I felt like a human. Prior to that I’d been divided up into half this, quarter that. At school you get called the boong, the abo, the coon, the nigger—all that sort of stuff—or the whatever they decided to call you. And all through growing up you’re classified as, ‘Oh, your mum’s white, your dad’s black.’ So you’re half this, you’re half that. You were never a complete whole thing. And when I truly found Islam and gave… and submitted, that’s when I felt like a human.

(Music)

I used to try and explain it out, to say, ‘Oh, it is because… ‘cos Aboriginal people did this and Muslims did this. So that means it’s all right.’ But I don’t see any reason why I should have to do that anymore, you know?’ Maybe I was trying to justify to Indigenous people that say, ‘You’re turning your back on your culture.’ But do you go for something that is going to take you out of the gutter and help you survive and help you become a better husband, father and neighbour, or do you sort of search for something that you probably have no hope of ever finding?

(Music)

Janak Rogers: Sydney-based lawyer, Justin Agale, however, feels he has found meaningful parallels between his Aboriginal traditional beliefs and Islam and that these have helped build the foundations of his spirituality today.

Justin Agale: When you’re looking at things such as unification of God and the level of what we call tajwid in Islam, we start to see that the way that Indigenous people lived in harmony with nature but also within their communal groups, where everything is connected to each other and where no action is without consequence and nature is connected to the tribe, the tribe is connected to the individual, the animals and everything that’s going out unseen and seen, this is also very much in line with Islam, especially when you start getting into Sufism—being able to see the face of God in all things. And this is something which is a specialty of Indigenous people.

Janak Rogers: Justin adds that Islam and his traditional beliefs resonate because they both assert fundamental truths about the state of nature and, ultimately, who we should be as humans.

Justin Agale: I think the most important level, though, is at the highest spiritual levels, looking at symbolism and how both… and especially the primordial state which Islam talks about—the fitra—and something which is very big in perennial philosophy of getting back to that primordial state, which is something which is in Indigenous culture and is very much entrenched in all spiritual traditions, about getting back to that innate goodness within human beings.

(Malcolm X speech and Miriam Makeba song)

Janak Rogers: Today there are about a thousand Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples who identify as Muslim. So the community is not huge, but it is growing. In the past 15 years, it has doubled.

But in many ways I’d argue that it’s not the numbers that are most important in this story, it’s what’s the history teaches us. From the Makassans to the Afghans and to the influence of American civil rights activist Malcolm X, we see that Aboriginals and Muslims lived and worked together, for the most part as equals. They intermarried and they found shared spiritual beliefs. Furthermore, early Muslim immigration to Australia contributed significantly to the opening up of the deserts and the building of crucial national infrastructure.

This almost hidden history in Australia in many ways is a counter-narrative to the colonial story. It reminds us that Australia’s heritage at its best has always been, and is, multicultural, multilingual and multi-faith.

(Music – Yothu Yindi)

That brings us to the end of this week’s program. Technical production was by Matthew Crawford and the executive producer was David Rutledge. I’m Janak Rogers—thanks for your company.

Guests

Dr Peta Stephenson

Author

Hanifa Deen

Author

Raymond Satour

Aboriginal-Afghan descendant

Azeem Khan

Aboriginal-Afghan descendant

Anthony Mundine

Boxer, Aboriginal Muslim convert

Farhan Khalil

NSW Corrective Services, Prison Imam

Justin Agale

Aboriginal Muslim convert

'Mohammed'

Aboriginal Muslim convert

Tom

Aboriginal-Afghan descendant

Dr John Bradley

Deputy Director Monash Indigenous Centre

Dr Howard Morphy

Professor of AnthropologyDirector, Research School of HumanitiesAustralian National University

Publications

Title

Islam Dreaming: Indigenous Muslims in Australia

Author

Dr Peta Stephenson

Publisher

UNSW Press 2011

Title

Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders

Author

Nonie Sharp

Publisher

Aboriginal Studies Press 1993

Title

Caravanserai: Journey Amongst Australian Muslims

Author

Hanifa Deen

Publisher

Freemantle Press 2003

Title

Tin Mosques and Ghan Towns

Author

Christine Stevens

Publisher

Tower Books 2003

Title

Muslim Australians: the deep histories of contact

Author

Regina Ganter

Publisher

Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 32, 2008

Title

Reflections & Voices: Exploring the Music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunipinju